"I'm basically a little old-fashioned," Colin Bundy suggests. This isn't the kind of remark you expect from the head of a higher education institution in these market-driven days, but it's somehow appropriate when it comes from the director of the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas).

While other universities have been happy to mix it in the political and commercial worlds, Soas has been happy to maintain a rather lower profile. Maybe it's the nature of its specialisms or the fact that its postgraduates outnumber undergraduates, but whatever the case, Soas has been out of step with the mainstream by concentrating on the academic.

In the post-9/11, post-Saddam, post-Kilroy world, Bundy admits that Soas may have missed a trick or two by remaining so anonymous. "We are the centre of excellence for societies outside the affluent, developed northern hemisphere," he says, "and Africa, Asia and the Middle East have never been so relevant as they are now. We can play an important role in sweeping aside patterns of ignorance."

Except it hasn't quite happened like that. Over the past few decades the odd pinstripe suit from the Foreign Office has strolled over to Russell Square to consult on quick-fix language provision courses for overseas postings, and in more recent years interested parties from the Department for International Development have made the journey to chew the fat. But on the big issues? Nada, nothing, zilch. The government might have been happy to plagiarise a US postgraduate thesis 10 years out of date to support its Iraq dossier, but it didn't think to ask any of the Soas staff with expertise in the area.

So was Bundy surprised that no weapons of mass destruction were found? "Er, no," he says, a little embarrassed to be put on the spot. "I joined the march against the war before hostilities broke out and nothing that's happened since has persuaded me that the government made a legitimate case for going to war."

You can't imagine many other vice-chancellors taking part in peace protests, but this is just another part of Bundy's old-fashioned image. He hasn't bought into the chief-executive ethos wholesale. "I still believe in the power of protest to change things," he explains.

As well he might. Bundy was brought up in what he describes as "a succession of small, dusty towns in the hinterland of the Eastern Cape" in South Africa, where his parents taught in all-black schools. He took a first degree at the University of Natal before flying north to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship. His first academic job was at Manchester Poly in 1973, and he fully expected never to return to his homeland. His political views had already placed him on the persona non grata list.

But home ties proved too much and in 1985 he moved back to South Africa, during the state of emergency, to be professor of history at the University of Cape Town. It was a scary time. One of his closest academic friends, David Webster, was assassinated by the secret police and Bundy himself had to be smuggled into political meetings under blankets to protect his safety. "There were other people under worse threats than me," he points out, "and it would have been self-indulgent to get too scared."

The protests paid off, as the apartheid regime was forced to stand down, and within a few years Bundy found himself out of an academic job and into an administrative one. "It was totally unexpected," he admits. "The previous vice-rector, Jakes Gerwel, got called up at a week's notice to become Mandela's director-general, and I suddenly found myself acting vice-rector."

Unplanned it may have been, but he must have proved a natural. Within two years, he had been appointed vice-chancellor of the University of Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, where he navigated the institution through the tricky waters of the aftermath of South Africa's 1997 higher education bill. The experience stood him in good stead for the current upheavals in the UK.

"When I took up the directorship of Soas in 2001," he says, "one of my biggest fears was whether any skills I had picked up in South Africa were transferable to this country. I'm pleased to say they appear to be. What I had to deal with at Wits were questions of marketisation, relations with state, access and widening participation. These are all live issues here.

"The difference is one of nuance. In South Africa, universities had become too much of an ivory tower and needed a reintroduction to the pressures of the real world. In the UK, we have perhaps gone too far down the line of seeing universities as pit-stops for national economies. It's partly a response to 30 years of underfunding: universities have had to adopt the neo-utilitarian line of asserting their usefulness to justify more money. But we run the risk of losing sight of some of our other important functions. We should not just be a mirror to society, but a critical lens: we have a far more important role to play in democracy and the body politic than merely turning out graduates for the job market."

It should come as no surprise, then, that Bundy also takes a decidedly old-fashioned approach to top-up fees. "I believe higher education should be funded out of the public purse," he says, "though the argument against top-up fees was effectively lost with the Dearing report in 1997.

"What's followed, though, has been depressing. People have lapsed lamely into the mantra that fees are good. The rationalisation of the argument that the user benefits and should therefore pay has become threadbare. It's a specious line of thought. It's an inescapable reality that higher education benefits society, in both actual and intangible ways."

So does he believe that many vice-chancellors have sold out by chasing the easiest source of cash on offer? Bundy checks himself. "I wouldn't be that judgmental." At least not in public. He goes on to argue that tuition fees have proved a great smokescreen to discussing the further changes in higher education, such as private and corporate universities, that the present government has planned.

But it's when we get round to the principle of variability that Bundy really starts spitting. Soas is, for the time being, reserving judgment on price differentials, preferring to see which way the vote goes tonight, but if the strong-arm tactics of the government whips win the day, then Bundy predicts that the trouble will really start.

"The faith-based reliance on the market to make the sector more efficient and desirable is absurd," he says. "And regardless of whatever anyone else is charging, it would be extremely difficult to create price differentials within faculties. It would be extremely demoralising and divisive for all concerned. What most universities will do is focus on the high-earning courses to bring in the fees and dispense with the less profitable: we could end up with a large number of students studying a narrow range of courses.

"It's also absurd to suggest that pulling in large numbers of overseas students, as some milch cow, can help balance the books. There is clearly a finite pool of students, and our own experience [Soas has one of the highest percentages of overseas students] shows that the more Hefce force us to charge, the fewer students we get."

Bundy's abhorrence to creating an internal market within Soas is no surprise. Over the past two years he has worked hard to unite the 16 departments, which used to work in atavistic isolation, into three faculties in order to allow for greater communication between staff and better devolvement of budgets. Price divisions would destroy the harmony he has worked so hard to achieve.

"Our academics are doing fantastic and interesting work here," Bundy says, "and we are busy creating new synergies. If we have a problem, it is that in the past we have not been as visible or audible as we could have been. When I travel abroad, I'm always amazed that Soas's reputation is greater outside the UK than it is within."

Bundy hopes this will soon change. One of the most exciting developments at Soas is the new £5m Lisbet Rausing building for the prestigious endangered languages project that Princess Anne is due to open this April. So has Bundy ordered in the dog handlers? He laughs, before deflecting. "Thankfully, it's not me who has to make those kind of arrangements." An old-fashioned gentleman to the last.

CV

Name Colin James Bundy

Age 59

Job Director and principal, School of Oriental and African Studies

Before that senior lecturer, Manchester Polytechnic; research fellow, Oxford University; professor of history, University of Cape Town; vice-rector, University of Western Cape; vice-chancellor, University of Witwatersrand

Likes cricket, chess, music and hiking

Goal To be like the swallows - spend the winter in South Africa and summer over here